Thursday, August 27, 2009

day49 - day50 pretty nifty!

day49 - tuesday - put up the appendix graphs and describe the results and why they don't matter, hence why they ended up in the appendix intstead of the main part.

day50 - do the small itsy bitsy changes that were noted down in the process over the last 50 days but never acted upon. and ofcourse, write the abstract .. finally! and done!!

the second version of the thesis is now ready for your perusal :P.

so the statistics:
£ around 125-130pages depending on how i compile it.
£ 50 days of procrastination + work + weekend
£ 35 posts of this blah!

next post might arrive when Nr and Nj look at this version and suggest any final changes..... am sure they will, especially for the abstract .. it is quite amateurish ;)

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

day43 to day48 - all posts are late :P

day43 - revised chapter 5 aka Empirical Evaluation ... had to battle with lots of justifys, whys and why-is-the-graph-so warriors .. tackled them all except for the easy one requiring a figure to explain how a parameter works ..

day44 - revised chapter 6 aka Conclusions/FutureWork .. the earlier version of future work was somewhat massacred by Nr, but his questions did help in the process of raising it from the ashes again :P. the last paragraph has been left out .. apparently, world peace, cure for cancer and time-travel arent enough .. we need more wider and general direction for future work as well .. will work later when in the zone ;)

day45 - the example for chapter 4 .. something that has been delayed for so long .. and we find what? that a somewhat preliminary version already exists in the minithesis .. it is just a matter of copying and updating it .. and so we do .. not much of a task at all !! and follow that up with revising all the figures that demanded touch ups and the new figure that was left out yesterday.

day46 - saturday .. what do you expect?

day47 - sunday .. why do you even bother?

day48 - anti-appendicitis = generating graphs for the second part of the appendix. also generated input and started running the final set of experiments for this set of graphs. also took a look at the abstract that is to be written and gave up for the day.

\begin{abstract}
It is all blah!
\end{abstract}

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

day42 - the bolt and the blue

soon the day will come when this blog will tire of these pathetic thesis posts and rebel against the author. it will not let him login, not let him add more of his asinine daily commentary onto the burgeoning web. it will try to banish all those incongruous posts and hope to go back to its original state of bliss. and it might fail and fade into oblivion. or i might finish with the thesis before the blog loses patience with me. let us hope for the latter :P.

revision of chapter 4 wasn't tricky. well, almost. all of it was done except for the example part. yes, we are back to struggling with the infamous examples. we need to extend the running example to explain this part of the thesis as well. i knew it was coming, even while i was writing this chapter and consciously ignored to add the example. and now i will have to do it .. tomorrow?

also started the revision of chapter 5 aka Empirical Evaluation. most of the comments seem to be "why" or "justify". blah, i say.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

day41 - on the run?

i took a skewed weekend break, that is, friday and saturday and half of sunday. no, i didn't sincerely go to lab on sunday afternoon, but i did make attempts towards work and revise some of the second chapter aka Related Work. however, i was being too lazy and too smart for my own benefit and skipped most of the tough comments and tackled the straightforward bits only.

that meant, my work today turned out to be much larger than it looked. the morning was anyway devoured by references for the camera ready version of the workshop paper. an annoying issue i cant care to elaborate :P. and the afternoon, this chapter was revised to what i now hope is 'almost' perfection'. and attention can now be focussed on chapter 4 aka Adaptation.

Friday, August 14, 2009

day37 - spruce

finally, we have the pleasure of creating a new directory. and copy files carefully and lovingly :P. yes, the work on the next version of the the-sis has begun!

and i chose chapter 3 for the honours. it had the least number of comments and Nr had even praised it. yeah, it is an extremely rarely occurrence of Nr appreciating my writing. in fact, anyone's writing i think ;).

also, didn't have to stalk Nj for his set of comments. luckily, found him in a nearby bay, discussing something with some student and waited patiently with a keen eye for him to get ready to leave and then caught his attention and then put forward my demands :D.

done with chapter 3 and then turned the attention to chapter 2 aka Related Work. it is always the most hated part of anything i write. somehow. even just revising it seem to be quite annoying :D and that made me quit for the day.... lagging quite behind in the revision process

Thursday, August 13, 2009

day36 - dealing with the appendix

hey .. that rhymed so naturally :D

so the not so particularly important glossary was made proper. the other part of appendix that are those no-value-adding results. you see, sometimes while describing an experimental setup, i claim that i am showing results with these parameters only and not those because their results are also similar. thus, i was doing the good thing of not adding redundancy. however, these redundant results need to be included in the appendix for the sake of completeness and to prove that we weren't fibbing and being lazy :P

also, i can now start the revision. but where are the comments of Nj on all the chapters? haven't received them yet. should i start stalking him now? ;)

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

day35 - refine to refer

due to the post-chapter-completion-lethargy disorder, my feeble attempts towards work were mostly futile.

the only saving grace was that i managed to clean up the bibliography, and cite the references in the proper format now .... was using a stop-gap arrangement before ;)

tomorrow, we shall 'gloss' the thesis :P

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

day34 - back with a wham bam?

finally, after 20 days, i am back to the great task of continuing the thesis writing. the last chapter awaited. given that it had been effectively postponed for 3 weeks, it kind of deserved some respect. or so we thought. but less than 5 hours after i sat down to tackle it, it was done. there it lay in front of me, staring expectantly at its own fate :P.

the first part of the chapter was the "Conclusions", which was basically a summary of the summaries of all the chapters until then. wasn't too hard to write. the second part is the more interesting "Future Work". i wonder why we need that in a thesis. do i really intend to continue working on this topic beyond my phd? also some not-so-well-acquainted-with-research might question, if you do have future work, how come you are already done with your phd? :P. Nr had advised me that the future work should be written such that it is not too close and too small to the thesis contributions. otherwise, we would be making the task of a nagging examiner easier and he/she would question why this future work is not already part of the phd thesis ;).

anyway, i looked to Su aka nikheel for inspiration and he suggested the "cure for cancer" and "world peace" as two probable tasks that i might consider listing as part of "Future work". i also wanted a third task. he suggested "warp speed", whatever that meant. but i felt that "time travel" would be more suitable. as you see, once time-travel is solved, there will never ever be any need for listing any future work as all work of the future can be easily obtained by travelling to the future. thus, the problem of "Future Work" can be resolved once and for all, if only someone takes up my suggestion of "time-travel" as future work ;)

oh, by the way, the last chapter has also been sent to Nr and Nj. tomorrow, might be the day to work on the glossary, refine the references, and ponder about the appendix!